7 Practical Strategies to Overcome Emotional Pain

Life is filled with emotional bumps, bruises, illnesses, and strains. In Psychology Today blogger Guy Winch’s new book, Emotional First Aid, you can gain insight into why such experiences as rejection, loss, and failure hurt so much and how you can overcome the psychological injuries these can create.

We can all benefit from self-help books with a solid empirical basis that translate technical jargon into practical advice, and Winch’s book definitely falls in that category. He analyzes the 7 most difficult situations we face in our lives and provides remedies for each. Carrying the injury and illness metaphor throughout, he shows how we can repair our emotionally broken bones to recover from the poison of guilt, and overcome other common deficiencies of our emotion repair system.

Let’s take a look at these 7 sources of emotional injury and briefly examine their cures or antidotes:

1. Cuts and scrapes caused by rejection. Whether a friend stops returning your calls, a lover breaks up with you, someone unfriends you on Facebook, or your work buddies snub you, even if unintentionally, it hurts. You may become angry at them, yourself, or the world in general. Even if the rejection is a slight one, it can be enough to cause you question your self-worth. Winch’s remedy for rejection involves a four-pronged strategy: Don’t accept self-criticism, rebuild your self-worth by focusing on your strengths, find other people to fill the void, and desensitize yourself to the pain of future rejection through practice bouts in which you set yourself up for mild rejections that you can readily overcome.

2. The relationship muscle weakness of loneliness. People can become or remain lonely through sheer atrophy, according to Winch. The longer you go without relating closely to others, the more difficult it becomes to reestablish contact with new people, or even get back in touch with the old friends you’ve drifted away from. The good doctor recommends a set of strategies targeted to the specific cause of your loneliness. If you’re convinced that no one could ever love or care about you, try to fight that pessimism with some logical counter-arguments. That pessimism might include believing that others are always thinking negatively about you. Here again, try some logic to counter your skepticism by questioning your own negative assumptions. A variant of this skepticism is the tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviors that serve, ironically, to confirm your worst suspicions. Exercising your empathy can also strengthen your relationship muscles, making it more likely that those you care about will want to be close to you. One relatively easy strategy, though it requires some commitment, is to adopt a pet on whom you can practice getting and giving emotional rewards.

3. Broken bones of loss and trauma. Distress is a natural emotion that results when someone close to you dies or you suffer a traumatic experience involving your own safety. Some people seem to have a natural resilience, however, or at least an ability to recover that they develop over the course of their lives. As Winch states, “Loss and trauma can shatter the pieces of our lives, ravage our relationships, and subvert our very identities” (p. 85). The experience of loss also shatters your assumptions about the world, making you realize that it’s not as safe a place as you once thought. Winch wisely recommends that particularly in the immediate aftermath, you find a way to ease the pain that is consistent with your ordinary coping style. It may be too early for you to examine the meaning of the loss for your life and your future; instead, you may be better able to recover by giving yourself more time to heal.

4. The poisonous effect of guilt. Rejection, loneliness, and loss are painful experiences caused, in part, by our need for strong connections with others. In guilt, you essentially are the source of your own unhappiness. Guilt can be adaptive when it shows you where you’ve strayed from your own moral compass. However, just as often as not, it’s unhealthy. Winch describes the three types of unhealthy guilt as unresolved, survivor, and separation (or disloyalty). Unresolved guilt refers to the feelings left behind when you believe you may not have completely apologized for a wrong you committed against another person even though, in reality, you did. Survivor guilt occurs when you literally outlive someone in a case where you easily could have died yourself. In separation guilt, you feel that you don’t have the right to pursue your own independent life and success because to do so makes others seem flawed in comparison. To overcome guilt, you need either to apologize (for the unresolved variety) or apologize to and then forgive yourself (for survivor or separation guilt). After you’ve forgiven yourself, you need to feel that it’s okay for you to re-engage with your life and go on to enjoy that success you feel so guilty about. The people you think you’re being disloyal to may, to your surprise, be the first in line to cheer you on.

5. Emotional scabs of rumination. Going over and over the unpleasant or disappointing experiences in your life, whether real or imagined, takes its toll on your well-being. Like a scar that you pick at over and over again, it will leave a permanent mark unless you learn how to stop. Winch points out that rumination not only causes you to relive the pain of the initial experience, but also saps your cognitive resources by draining away your mental energy and causing you to lose focus. The first step to overcoming rumination is to realize that other people don’t see the world the same way that you do. Make a mistake? Fail at an important goal? Trip and fall while walking down the street? The chances are, according to Winch, that you’re the one most aware of your small slip-ups. Once you realize this, you’ll be less likely to replay the event in your mind’s eye. If that doesn’t work, you can to distract yourself by focusing on something else. Like getting toddlers to play with their actual toys and not the dangerous objects near the ground that more often attract them, you need to by your own mom and make the harmless playthings look like fun. If it’s anger at someone else that you’re mulling over, try to put a positive spin on it. When people tease you or try to make you feel inadequate, reframe things so that you see their jabs as motivational fuel for your own self-improvement.

6. The psychological pneumonia of failure. You’ve probably discerned a theme by now running through the situations most likely to cause pain. When you’re thwarted in your ability to reach a goal, your self-esteem is bound to take a hit (more on this below). We’ve already seen how much of a toll rumination and rejection can take; in part, the hurt you feel in these circumstances can be traced to the loss of face that accompanies mistakes and breakups. In addressing the problem of failure head on, Winch’s advice is to seek support from those closest to you who can help you gain perspective on the situation. They may also help you “get real,” and stimulate you to recognize that even though you may have failed in this one area of your life, it doesn’t mean that you are a complete and utter failure in all areas of life. By talking to someone else, you may also help to get the perspective you need so that you can look for a silver lining in the experience. Another treatment for overcoming feelings of failure applies to situations that haven’t happened yet but where you fear that your efforts will surely fall flat. Replacing anxiety, fear, and sadness with humor is another excellent way to cope with real or imagined failures. In this regard, imagining your own failure can be a major cause of performance anxiety. If you can find ways to distract yourself from your fear of failure, you can actually prevent the failure from happening.

7. Low self-esteem's danger to your emotional immunity. Having low self-esteem can certainly result from a number of the threats to your emotional health that we’ve already seen. However, once your self-esteem starts to dip, it can become a self-perpetuating process. You start to question yourself and your worth, and pretty soon you are making those mistakes and missteps that you feared would happen. With low self-esteem also comes your greater vulnerability to other people’s critical comments (real or imagined), you feel responsible for the bad things in your life, you ruminate over your frailties, and will lack the self-efficacy that you need to succeed at important life tasks. Many of the treatments Winch has already described can be applied, but in even larger doses, when it comes to building your self-esteem. These include having compassion for yourself (and those frailties) and taking a mental catalogue of your strengths. You can also allow yourself to hear compliments for the well-intentioned comments they are generally meant to be rather than questioning their sincerity. Finally, build up your mental reserves by practicing mindfulness, exercising your willpower “muscles,” and accepting the fact that occasional lapses and failures interfere with your best-intentioned efforts.

To sum up, Winch’s approach falls within the general category of cognitive-behavioral therapy which proposes that emotional change follows from changes in thoughts and behavior. Rather than becoming mired in emotional self-doubts, worry, and sadness, you can take actions that will help you see the world, and yourself, in a more positive light. When these actions don’t work, then it may be time to consult a mental health professional (a message Winch carries consistently throughout the book).

Many of the ordinary emotional lows people experience can be treated with one or more simple do-it-yourself strategies. Once you figure out which treatment to apply, the results can build your immunity and your psychological health for years to come.

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I think the goal is not to think about all of the things you wish would happen, because like you said, it can cause pain when it doesn't happen. It's best to focus on appreciating and valuing the things you have now and today. So small stuff like being grateful for the food you eat, the home you have, the friends and family that are still alive, being grateful for nice weather, appreciating when someone does something nice for you. We tend to focus so much on the negative things that happen that we ignore all the wonderful things happening around us everyday. I think once you become grateful for that, then waiting for the things that you want won't hurt as much if they never come because you're so happy in the present.

This is incorrect. They hurt worse when you try the think small approach. Part of the issue is that no one who actually has major depression writes this stuff. Depression is not a state of mind. It is a lifelong illness some have and others do not. My first suicide attempt was at 12 years old and my last was when I was 26. I am 28 now, on 4 medications, and in therapy every week. if only I appreciated the weather. This sounds like the Secret more than medical science. Tell me, when I feel rejection it feels like I've been raped. It doesn't feel like rejection. Now I do tons of mindfulness exercises, exercising in general, and practice healthy eating. I get rejected again and it feels like rape (yes I have been raped). If I had to choose between actual rape and rejection, I'd choose rape. While I appreciate your attempt to help people like me, you are hurting us by making depression seem like a mental state as opposed to a neurological disorder. How about we for once share the blame for emotional pain. Instead of making a depressed person feel bad, figure out ways they can avoid the emotional reaction. I no longer hit on women. I'm a bit lonely but much better. Remove the trigger completely. That's how psychiatric wards work. I've been in several. I fear inpatient care more than I fear death. Next time you want to know how to help with depression just ask someone who actually suffers from MDD or Dysthymia.

Thanks for this article. It makes a lot of sense as we tend to mull over our failures and forget our strengths and can become overwhelmed with pain and lose our focus. Personally, after suffering from major depression following rejection by my family, I fell into painful rumination about past abuse that robbed me of the clarity to enjoy my current life. The upside was that the painful inner journey led to me finding a blissful sense of peace and calm as i eventually tapped into my core. Now I laugh at myself, and kick myself, for allowing people who had abused and used me for years to have such a strong impact on how I felt about myself. Humans are odd and they tend to recall a negative event repeatedly and overlook the positive as if trying to find a way to avoid a repeat of that painful or unpleasant situation in the future. We are hard-wired to prefer pleasure to pain; however, we seen more attached to pain than pleasure when it comes to reviewing our past...whether hours before or years before. For instance, I work with many people and yet the difficult characters always stand out. Guess the problem may be that we see things differently and therefore clash as we want to be heard and have our version accepted as valid as if this validates our very being. One man's meat is another man's poison. and who wants to consume poison, despite another person trying to pass it off as tasty as it works for them - but not for you!).

It feels like a weight around my neck and hangs near my heart. I can feel it balancing near my diaphragm. A box of rotten anger, sadness, anxiety.. a vile mixture of self torment, over things I can't go back in time and change. The people who he hurt, who through my own inability to speak out now suffer a similar sadness.

The ex who killed herself, not that I had any part in her choice, she'd probably forgotten about me months ago but I didn't see it coming. I didn't expect that the news would affect me so badly. A more recent ex who left me because she's not able to deal with my behaviour any more. (This latter event seems mostly indifferent to me, i'm not sure if it was a kindness.. history continues to repeat it's self.. self harming isn't always as obvious as wounded skin.)

When I'm with other people it doesn't hurt as much but it's always there; it makes me do things like get drunk.. too drunk, out of control, I breakdown and cry. When I sober up I feel pathetic for breaking down in front of others, deep regret then adds to the weight in the box and dealing with chaotic feelings of knowing I lost control adds to the anxiety. (The hangover makes me feel hollow.. an horrible consuming sadness, my inner monologue turns sour and or fickle.. there's not much I can do to switch it off.. even for just a few minutes respite from the malaise).

I spend too much time alone, in fact I want to be alone to lament and hopefully cry because then the weight feels lessened but recently I've not been able to cry when I want/need to. But then something as trivial as a TV program will open the box, if i'm not alone, wrestling with the tears is doable.. but is this helping?

I don't want to feel this way, empty, worthless and lacking interest in everything... time passes me by and life feels wasted. I've isolated myself from friends and family. Who would want someone like me around? On the face of it, from reading these words you'd think no-one. I'm actually a popular clown, i'm told I can be the life and soul.. but inside, the box is close to bursting and staying afloat is getting more difficult.

I don't expect or need any words of sympathy on here. I've only written this because I was hoping to lessen the weight before bed but unfortunately my eyes remain dry. I just feel slightly embarrassed about seeming self centered, a victim of my own poisonous thoughts and feelings. Maybe writing this down was a good idea though, i need to explain this a counsellor this week.

I know there's no magic cure that will rid me of the box, it's probably perfectly natural.. it could just be that not everyone has the same memories that my mind won't let go of and it's me that chooses to flog myself with them.

You didn't mention what is causing the pain in your life; however, your words were enough to imagine that you must be going thru something heavy with a sense of vulnerability. I hope that the gift of peace finds its way to you.

I found this article really helpful. I've suffered alot of emotional pain in my life, because I have schizophrenia and OCD. Yet, I start to see the day dawning where I could be free of emotional pain. What really helps is using coping skills I learn online. And, of course, Jesus!

What do you recommend for the sadness that sometimes rears its ugly head before or during a joyous time, a holiday or family celebration. I sometimes have to walk out of a wedding and wander in the cold outside wearing just my wedding finery because I cannot stand the joy. I have extra nerves and misery before a holiday, perhaps because it won't be right with a somewhat estranged spouse and bad taste of boisterous family members. Yuk.
What to do.... And passover is coming. Do u really have to make his family favorites and pretend you can tolerate them. Always brings a few tears and wild thoughts of running away.....

I note that I am several years late to this party but I just read this piece in search of a way to manage my own long standing emotional pain caused by my adult son's rejection, a son I loved and nurtured when his father decided to dump on him and have fun elsewhere. I am doing what I can to heal this deep wound and it is much much harder complex work than Winch's promise of emotional first aid.

This is an interesting piece but it's focus on our intellect and cognition (our left brain) being the solution struck me as blinkered. It is in relationship that we acquire emotional pain and it is in a different kind of relationship that we can obtain emotional repair. Good relationship engages both left and right brain. I note that Susan nods briefly at this, without saying as much, at the end of her piece.

For as long as we continue to believe that we can resolve all our ills cognitively then we are truly emotionally doomed.